Diamond Shavings: Your Friday Web Roundup

October 29, 2010byRob Bates

One note: I will be leaving tonight for Israel, to cover the
upcoming KP Plenary meeting, and I hope to blog a bit from there. But this
round-up may be late (or early) next week, depending on my free time.

Campaign launched against
Israeli diamonds. While I support adding human rights language to the KP,
it is perhaps inevitable that bringing up such issues will make it more
politicized and drag in all sorts of tangential topics, like Israel/Palestine,
etc. On the KP’s Facebook
page, one of the activists involved in the KP (Nadim Kara) says bringing in
topics like this, especially if they don’t have anything to do with diamond
extraction, would
make the mandate “too broad.” That is true, but even so, sensitivity about
these issues may be why we don’t see any human rights language included in the
KP. (One note: Please do not discuss Israel/Palestine in the comments. This
isn’t the place for it. Thanks.)